Over the past few months a lot of news about how the social web is growing up / changing right before our computer screens has been about social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and the online video war between HTML 5 vs Flash vs Apple vs Adobe as a video experience for users. Not to be left out in the cold earlier this year Google launched Google Buzz with somewhat of a warm yet controversial welcome due to email privacy and public contacts concerns. Since then the little search engine giant that could, Google has announced a few updates for their line of products. In case you missed any of the Google news, here’s a list of recent announcements made by Google not in any particular order.

It’s only been a year since we launched the Google Analytics Data Export API and developer programs. To celebrate we are highlighting some of the exciting solutions that extend Google Analytics in our new Google Analytics Application Gallery!

Last fall, we launched Place Pages which organize relevant and useful information about places on Google Maps. Since then we’ve been developing a version, available now, which gives you access to the same useful information optimized for your mobile phone.

When it comes to mobile search, we strive to not only give you the same comprehensiveness and relevance as when searching with Google on your computer, but also a consistent look, feel, and overall user experience. So today, as we roll out a new look for Google Search results on your computer, we are happy to announce similar changes to Google Search results for mobile.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Right now, there are a handful of Google Wave gadgets designed to help you bring information from other sites into a wave and interact with that content collaboratively. It will be a wonderful day when every website can be wave-ified inside a Google Wave gadget, but until then, I want to share a simple method for embedding arbitrary webpages inside a wave- a new third party extension called the Iframe Gadget. When you insert this gadget, you (and anyone else in the wave) can specify the URL of a webpage, and the gadget will render that site right inside the wave. It works best with webpages that provide an embed code, like Google Maps, and fill all the available screen space.

Since we’re celebrating our very first half-birthday, we thought it was the ideal time to update you on how things are going. On average, around 100,000 unique visitors a day check out their Dashboard, 85 percent for the first time. Since launch, we’ve worked to grow Dashboard, adding a number of other Google products including Sites, Maps, Books, Webmaster Tools, Buzz, Goggles, Sidewiki and Analytics. We’re still working on adding other products to the tool and are talking with users about new ways to improve the functionality moving forward.

We’ve added contextually relevant, left-hand navigation to the page. This new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Over the past three years, we’ve launched Universal Search, the Search Options panel and Google Squared, and it’s those three technologies that power the left-hand panel.